Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021

Sylvia Plath & Olive Higgins Prouty

Sylvia Plath grew up in Wellesley, Mass. In 1950 she was awarded a scholarship to attend Smith College. She learned that her scholarship was funded by Olive Higgins Prouty. If there is an unsung hero in Sylvia Plath's life, it is Olive Prouty.

First Meeting

Prouty would influence the course of Plath's life in important ways — none of which Plath could have forseen when she entered college in 1950. The revelation of her benefactress filled her with excitement and anxiety.

If only I can meet all the opportunities," she wrote. "Just now I feel rather overwhelmed."

In the fall of 1950, Sylvia wrote a thank-you note to Mrs. Prouty about her love of Smith and her writing ambitions. To her astonishment, Mrs. Prouty wrote back inviting her to tea over the Christmas break. Plath was extremely anxious about the meeting; to prepare, she read all of Prouty's novels, and for the tea, she dressed with great care, rechecking the seams of her stockings and clutching her white gloves nervously. On the bus ride to Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, she began to panic.

What if they took away my scholarship and gave it to some senior who was writing a best-seller novel? Worst of all, what if Olive Higgins Prouty was disappointed in me?

When the bus driver called out her stop, she walked up the elegant, curved driveway to Mrs. Prouty's white mansion. A maid ushered her into the living room, where she waited stiffly by the fire. She was admiring the blue walls, French windows, and gold curtains when she heard a warm voice call, "Why, you must be Sylvia!" Over tea and cucumber sandwiches, Plath relaxed. Mrs. Prouty asked her if she had ever written about her family, but she demurred that they were just "ordinary."

Prouty said

For you, perhaps, but not for me, not for others. Think of the material you have there!

Writing about her own family had never occurred to Plath.

I had always wanted to write about something very grand and complicated, very important and world-shaking. Home seemed, so close, so familiar that I took it for granted.

Prouty advised her to forge stories out of the problems and conflicts that had arisen in her own life. She took this advice to heart.

Writing Success

In 1952 Plath entered her short story 'Sunday at the Mintons' in the college fiction contest that Mademoiselle magazine ran that year. Her story won, and the magazine published her story in the summer of 1952 — the summer between her sophomore and junior years at Smith. She was now a published writer. Mrs. Prouty wrote to her, praising the story's technique, especially “the similes and metaphors that remain clearly etched upon my consciousness.” She asked Sylvia to keep her posted on her “future successes — or failures. Both.” Prouty intuited that Plath needed permission to fail.

The summer of the next year, June 1953, Mademoiselle made Plath their guest managing editor, working in Manhattan and staying at the Barbizon Hotel. She worked under Cyrilly Abels, the chief editor.

Mental Illness

At age 20, Sylvia began to experience sleeplessness and depression. She visited a Doctor Thornton in Boston. That summer she paid a visit to Mrs. Prouty, who nonetheless found Sylvia to be charming, and had no idea how Sylvia was suffering.

Years later, in May 1962, Plath wrote in a progress report on The Bell Jar how “Esther's shock treatment goes wrong: there is not enough voltage and she is conscious during it, feels as if she were being electrocuted, thinks shock treatments are supposed to be like that, and says nothing. She resolves to kill herself, rather than suffer another.”

This parallels Plath's own experience at the hands of Dr. Thornton — a bad experience with electroshock therapy, botched by the hospital.* She did not know at the time that Mrs. Prouty would be willing to pay for her treatment at a luxurious private hospital. She saw instead a lifetime of incarceration and torture at the hands of arrogant and uncaring doctors.

* I question whether there is such a thing as well-administered shock therapy. Electric shock therapy was practiced for years by the profession, absent any solid evidence that it helped the patient — in the face of plenty of solid evidence that it did harm.

Prouty Steps In

After Plath's suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 Prouty wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Thornton about his botched electroshock treatment:

Unfortunately the shock treatments at Valley Head proved disastrous, as you know. Sylvia was not hospitalized during the treatments and her experience and memory of the shock treatments led to her desperate act. I realize that you left on vacation during the course of the treatments, but the fact remains that she was not properly protected against the results of the treatments, which were so poorly given that the patient remembers the details with horror. I feel very strongly that Sylvia should have been guarded against what happened, while she was undergoing the shock treatments. I think her attempt at suicide was due largely to the horror of what she remembers of the shock treatments, and the fears aroused . . . I would like to hear from you in regard to this . . . Have you no interest in a case that had such a disaster following your treatment of her?

Prouty had hit a nerve. Three days later, a riled Dr. Thornton wrote her an angry, condescending reply. He called her “psychiatrically ignorant” and her opinions “worthless.” He claimed that Plath had responded favorably to the treatments — an outrageous professional claim given Plath's subsequent suicide attempt. He hoped his letter would “stimulate” her to learn more about psychiatry and asked her not to “burden” his office with “any further communication.” Still, Thornton agreed to cut his bill in half — the closest he would come to an apology. Seven years later, in her poem The Hanging Man, Plath would likewise suggest that her botched electroshock treatment led to her first suicide attempt:

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

Sylvia planned to recuperate at a friend's summer home in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, under the care of a private nurse. Aurelia, Sylvia's mother, would have trouble affording the bill from Dr. Thornton and the Newton-Wellesley hospital. Prouty told Aurelia that she would cover the bill and try to arrange further psychiatric care.

“No illness is so hard for the family of the patient, so difficult to deal with wisely, and no suffering is so deep for the one afflicted,” Prouty wrote Aurelia. “I speak from experience.”

Prouty thought the Provincetown plan was "excellent — at least as a first step," but she encouraged Aurelia to consult a "wise doctor who has had experience with a nervous breakdown such as hers." Prouty sympathized with Aurelia's desire to keep her "sensitive child" out of a mental hospital but she herself had benefited from the care of Austen Riggs, a psychiatrist in Stockbridge Massachusetts, where she "went to get away from home and too much solictation and care from those dearest to me. Like Sylvia I felt I had become a burden and wanted to get away to relieve them." Prouty asked her own psychiatrist, Dr. Donald McPherson, to consult with Dr. Lindemann, though she immediately advised that Plath stay at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, "a delightful country-club-appearing place, beautifully furnished with no suggestion of a sanitarium inside or out . . . The 'guests' are of a carefully seected group." Prouty hinted that she could pull strings so Plath's stay might be free; if not, she hinted that she would pay for her care. When Aurelia told Sylvia about Mrs. Prouty's offer, Sylvia replied, "That is hard to realize, but she no longer asked about the cost of her medical care." Aurelia felt that the news gave her daughter some relief.

Later in 1953 Plath spent time in the psychiatric ward at Mass. General Hospital, where Dr. Lindemann ovesaw her care. In The Bell Jar, Plath describes the MGH ward as a notch below Esther's previous one. The presence of Italian American patients and African American workers makes Esther, poisoned by racism, feel that she is falling "down, down,like a burning, then burnt-out star" through the mental health system. She fears, like Plath, that if she does not "get better" she will end up in a state hospital. But Mrs. Prouty was not about to let that happen. She began calling Dr. Lindemann at his home for advice about Sylvia's treatment, and she encouraged Aurelia to become a more aggressive advocate. "In your place, I would call him. He is a most kind and understanding man & would not feel it an intrusion." Lindemann reassured Aurelia and Prouty that Sylvia was not psychotic and would recover her mental health completely, though he also ominously "warned" her that more shock treatments might "totally" alter her personality — which Aurelia later came to believe. He recommended that she be moved to McLean Hospital in Belmont, with which he was affiliated. Prouty preferred Silver Hill in Connecticut, but McLean — another "country-club-appearing" place — would have to do.

Waking in the Blue: McLean Hospital, September 1953 - January 1954

Mrs. Prouty collected Sylvia from Massachusetts General Hospital in a limousine on September 14, 1953 and brought her to McLean.

Her bloated appearance depressed Sylvia, and she became listless during her unstructured days. Mrs. Prouty visited her in October and wrote Dr. Beuscher about her frustration regarding McLean's lack of routine.

"I told Dr. Wood (and I think he agreed with me) that I thought it would be beneficial to Sylvia if she had a definite schedule to follow each day — a routine which divided her day into periods. Each time I have visited her she has dwelt on the long objectless hours spent in her room."

Dr. Wood, however, informed Prouty that "schedules for patients was not the method now followed at McLean's." Occupational therapy was available — Sylvia practiced weaving and pottery — but she was still too depressed to "plan her own day".

Prouty also told Dr. Beuscher that Sylvia felt "isolated" and was "not mixing well with the other patients."

Sylvia was in a daily stupor due to her insulin treatment. Typing Prouty's manuscript was the one activity that seemed to lift Sylvia's spirits, and Sylvia asked her for more typing work. Aurelia remained on the sidelines that fall, shocked into submission while Prouty managed her daughter's care. Prouty tried to include her as best she could.

"You are Sylvia's mother & you are the one to decide what is best for her. I want you to express yourself freely to me and to know exactly what is going on in my mind and to share with you all the information the doctors give me."

But Aurelia allowed Sylvia's benefactor to make the relevant decisions. The two women took Sylvia for drives in late October — Prouty brought her out to a local farm stand, while Aurelia took her to visit her Aunt Dot.

By late November, Mrs. Prouty suspected that Dr. Beuscher was turning Sylvia against her mother. She was deeply cynical about Freudian concepts. To Aurelia she wrote, "you said Sylvia remarked to you last time you were there, 'why, I don't hate you, Mother!' That reveals what line is being followed — a line familiar to all of us in this age of psychoanalysis."